As numerous readers have written, one of the most moving aspects of “My Family’s Slave” is that Alex Tizon was able to honor Eudocia Tomas Pulido, whom he knew as Lola, by telling her story—while one of the tragedies is that Pulido was never able to tell it herself. My colleague Vann writes:

Tizon doesn’t know her desires, fears, attachments, or even very much about her own story. He attempts to learn these things, but doesn’t get very far, and we never learn whether the failure is due simply to Pulido’s reticence or to the fact that years of servitude had minimized her story even in her own mind.

After reading Alex’s essay and some of the criticism on social media, this reader wrote to us with the subject line, “On Eudocia, from someone who went through it”:

For half my childhood, I was indentured. I was born in Canada, went to school in this country, and it still happened to me. I’m incredibly thankful that I got to grow out of it, but trauma hurts the most in its resonance.

Listening to those claiming to seek justice for Eudocia has felt like a scab opening over and over again. Please, do not take actions on behalf of indentured and enslaved people without consulting them. Do not seek reparations for us without asking. Those in the disability rights movement say, “Nothing about us, without us.” I think this mindset applies to those of us who have gone through forced servitude. We don’t want what you think is best for ourselves.

For my own situation, finding peace and healing after escaping took precedent over any vengeance or confrontation. I would have hated to become a hashtag.

Several other readers also wrote in to say that Eudocia’s experiences reminded them of their own—including Juliet, whose mother came from Tarlac, the same province in the Philippines where Eudocia was born:

I may have accidentally found this article for a reason. I myself was a slave given to live with family members I didn’t even know. I had to wake up in a hard cold cement area under the stairway. Like a cold dog, I’d be woken up with harsh words and a kick on the rib cage jolting my teenage body. Sad to find out Lola didn’t get an education. I persevered to go to school at night when I was done with all my housework.

I ran away when things got worse and taught myself in a lot of ways to survive. But I don’t feel completely free. It becomes a codependency—it’s hard to explain, but it’s there, a learned trait. Part of life as a slave is interweaving survival and seeking freedom. You never know what freedom is because you have become immune.

I was brought to the city by my grandparents to study at a Catholic school back in the Philippines. That was in 1980. My parents were left in the province, as they had their jobs there.

My grandparents and my mother’s brothers and sisters would ask us to do errands, household chores, and wash their laundry while our cousins just sat down in the living room playing or chatting. When I was in elementary, I used to clean my aunt’s house during the weekends to be able to read my cousin’s fairy tale books in her library. This I did secretly.

There was no snack when we went to school, as my grandmother would constantly complain of having no money while we eat our meals. We were also prevented from eating anything from the fridge. Our parents were sending money, but it seems that it was not enough for them.

Finally, J. shares the long and painful story of her own escape:

I was brought to America from Korea when I was 6, and raised by my dad and a woman who I thought was my mother. I found out when I was 11 that she was my stepmother and that my real mother was the lady I was taught to believe was my temporary babysitter.

From age 6 to 14, I was a butt of every type of abuse this woman could throw at me. Words can not describe the cunning cruelty of this woman, who learned the most peculiar punishments from heaven knows where and decided they were appropriate to dole it out on me to get back at my dad for messing around behind her back. She used me as bait, calling my father to come home and “rescue” his daughter telling him that I would be punished until he raced back home from his mistress’s place. I was responsible for pleasing her by keeping a clean house, massaging her back and shoulders for hours after she finished work, and taking care of the dog she loved so dearly, all the while making sure to bring home straight As from school.

Everyone knew I was abused. Everyone saw it, pitied me, but no one did anything. Once I went to school with a giant, visible bruise and when the teacher asked what happened, I nonchalantly said that my mom hit me with the Barbie as punishment. Social services was called and my stepmom was hauled away to jail, but not before I came home and she beat everything out of me while my father stood by idly as he always did. My friends all knew, their parents knew, but no one did anything. They thought it wasn’t their business.

My dad did one thing that was in my favor—he sent me away every summer to his sister, who lived a very comfortable life in Canada with her husband and son. She taught me things about homemaking, took me on trips, gave me attention, and was a mother figure to me. And when I was 16, he sent me away to her for good. He said it was just for a year, but it wound up being much, much longer than that.

My second “Lola” story began there. I was now her burden, and my father did not give her any support to take care of me. She had lost her husband suddenly to a brain aneurysm three years prior and she was alone with a son in his teenage years and trying to manage a donut store that was failing against its fierce big-brand competitors.

From 16 to 17 when I graduated high school, I worked every day after school and weekend, sometimes into the wee hours of the night and morning because it was a 24-hour joint. And when I tried to leave to move back to NYC, she begged me to stay—after all, who was there for me all these years?

We all moved to another part of Toronto and we opened up a bagel store. For two years, I worked from crack of dawn until close, with no days off—96 hours a week while she golfed and dealt with her depression and anger issues. Never was a given a single dollar for work—never one penny. When push came to shove, I told her I needed to go to college. She agreed to let me go under two conditions—that my mother (whom I’d reconnected with) pay for it and that I continue to work for her, for free.

For four more years, I busted my ass morning and night. I took Civil Engineering and was offered paid internships—which she made me turn down, because who would run the store for her? I was broke, trapped and broken.

I understand Lola—she could have run away, she could have revolted, but in her way, she loved her owners. And she was scared to make waves. It was up to her to keep the peace in the family, her responsibility and burden to keep things going.

During my last semester, my aunt and my entire family moved to NYC and left me to fend for myself without a penny. I quickly found a job as a cashier in downtown Toronto restaurant and got my first pay in years. It was an amazing feeling. Within weeks, I got a promotion and within a year, I was a manager making excellent money.

That was 10 years ago. Today, I run two departments in a tech company. I travel the world, meet all kinds of people, and coordinate donations and volunteer activities with several charitable organizations that my steering committee and I select every quarter.

My “Lola” story is one with a happy ending. I am loved, I am strong, I am able to empathize with others, and I am able to give. Tragic events don’t have to remain that way. Cowardly people don’t have to remain that way either. And we all have the power to rise above.

Thanks for listening to my story.

If you would like to share a similar experience, please email us at hello@theatlantic.com. Update from another reader, who was born in Korea:

When I was 12, my mom passed away suddenly and my brother and I were sent to my father’s sister’s family in Dallas. She and her husband were and are a well-respected deacon family running a dry cleaners. They demanded green card fees and money from my family for the trouble of taking care of us.

I was woken up every morning at 5:30 to make breakfast for everyone while my aunt and her husband went to morning prayers and to work. My brother and I were never given lunch money, so we would have to bring something from home while our cousins of similar ages were paid for. We had to walk to and from school under hot Texas sun, while our cousins were picked up. They bad-mouthed us to our family back in Korea, as if we were partying and failing school while we were doing great. They made us write sobbing letters to home so the family would feel sorry for us and send more money, while we had to work at the dry cleaners on the weekend and during summer. I cleaned my aunt’s closets full of clothes and name-brand bags. I cleaned their bathrooms and made meals. I felt sorry for my brother, who is two years younger than me, so I would save up small coins I got from working at the store and gave it to him so he could buy something sweet at the school cafeteria. I was only 12, so I didn’t know how else to protect him. When my older cousin gave me an old shirt of hers, my aunt slapped me asking me if I had lost my mind. I prayed to God to take my life away in my sleep or wake me up from this horrible dream.

This continued until eventually money ran out and they sent us back with our expired passports. Even though they claimed that they paid for lawyers to get us green cards, there wasn’t such a thing. I begged my aunt to at least keep my younger brother so he could study in the U.S.—I would send money from working at a factory or something when I went back to Korea. They sent us back anyway because we were useless now.

I did well for myself. I had a good career. But I will never forgive and forget the life I went through and the trauma I had to get over because of them.

I am stunned by Alex’s story. Alex sat at a desk right beside mine for six months when we were both reporters at The Seattle Times. He was immensely talented and well-liked as well as respected.

When I learned his story would be on the cover of the magazine I was proud. Now, my feelings are mixed.

On the one hand, Alex was a dogged reporter, a talented writer, a friendly colleague. He certainly did a good job writing this story. I am sorry for the loss of a good journalist who was my co-worker.

But on the other hand, I’m embarrassed (I wonder: Why does any of this rub off on me?) that he did not do much more, much sooner to improve her life. Knowing what he did, why did he allow his mother to continue to “own” this woman? And why did he want The Seattle Times to publish an obituary after Lola’s death that failed to recognize the most significant fact of her life?

Several other readers also pointed out that obituary, in which Alex had described Lola to a reporter as a devoted grandmother figure who devoted her life to “cooking, cleaning and caring for three generations [and] asked for nothing in return.” The newspaper’s response to The Atlantic’s story is here.

Of the hundreds of emails we’ve received in response to Alex’s essay, nearly all express being moved by the story. Katrina Langford calls it a masterpiece: “I can only imagine how difficult this journey was to make as a writer.” Frank Daniels calls it “an amazing article, by an amazing and compassionate man.” Ruby Moon calls it a love letter: “It touched me to the point that it made me cry.” Many describe intense emotional reactions: tears, shaking hands, sweaty palms, and an inability to stop reading. They write about reading and weeping at work, in class, or in the middle of the night, as if Lola and Alex had entered their lives. From Magdalena Chudzinska:

I’ve just read the article “My Family’s Slave” by Alex Tizon. I cannot thank him, but I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to read such a beautiful story. I’ve been reading it for three days, during my little pauses at work. Couldn’t have finished it at one blow, because was always starting to cry and my team was asking me if everything was fine. I’m puzzled and cracked inside after this story … but that’s good.

However, Rob Byron, another reader, points out the limits of that point of view:

Jeffrey Goldberg hedges in his editor’s note by saying Alex Tizon’s piece is “the sort of journalism The Atlantic has practiced since its inception.” Respectfully, I would ask Mr. Goldberg to prove it. It’s straight memoir, soup to nuts, and the editorial decision to print it without any further reporting to prop it up seems dubious. Readers are left with too many questions: Was the point to raise awareness about the plight of unpaid or underpaid domestic workers in the U.S.? Was it to exorcise family guilt?

A friend of mine who’s a respected editor and colleague had this to say: “Hopefully some talented journalist will pick up the thread and report from [Lola’s] hometown about the slave system still in place there or dig deeper into slavery in the U.S. I’d like to see that journalism.”

So would I.

We’ll be publishing several articles to follow Alex’s essay, situating his story in a broader cultural and economic context. The first, by Ai-jen Poo, discusses the persistence of modern-day slavery in the U.S. We’ll also be publishing the personal stories of readers like Claudia, who experienced conditions similar to those Lola did. If you would like to share your story, please email hello@theatlantic.com; let us know where you’re writing from, and whether you’d like to remain anonymous.

At the least, Alex Tizon aided and abetted slaveowners, and The Atlantic links to an uncritical memorial to him before telling the story of the slave. The note should acknowledge the author’s role in his own story as much as his skill in writing about it and how “thrilled” The Atlantic was to run it.

But Kimberly McAllister writes:

I just saw the memo detailing the backlash to the story. I wrote in earlier praising the piece, and I just want to add that I didn’t get the sense at all that he was condoning what his family had done. He was horrified by his family’s treatment of Lola. To expect a young Alex to turn them in or criticize him for enabling their behavior is to lay the blame at the wrong person’s feet. It also foolishly ignores how complicated family relationships are. Just an additional thought.

Luiza adds:

Rarely are the narrators of the world’s most necessary or impactful stories blameless. I cannot help but agree that Tizon’s complacence over the years—especially as he grew older—amounts to an offense. Nevertheless, I do not agree that self-righteous indignation constitutes the appropriate response to this story or to Tizon’s actions. I doubt that many people would be brave enough to cut ties with their family (or at the very least, to seriously shake the foundations of their family relationships), even for such a good reason as the liberation of a slave.

Indifference to injustice also comes at a heavy cost, one that Tizon no doubt paid and continued to pay after Lola died. But I sympathize with him even while I lament his failures and those of his family. His story cannot compensate Lola’s suffering, but it reminds readers of the dangers of looking the other way.

Dana Marterella was upset by the article: “To make a disturbing story even worse, the ‘caring surrogate mother/servant’ trope is a highly problematic and tired cliché.” But a Filipina reader, Jewel Jumangit, explains the broader cultural context of that relationship:

An important note to this is that kasambahay or katulong culture is a socially accepted norm in the Philippines that dates way back. Now, our maids and yayas (nannies) who classify as kasambahay or katulong are protected by laws to make sure they are paid the minimum wage and are given benefits by the families they work for. Our kasambahays and katulongs become a part of our family, just like Lola was a member of the Tizon family despite being a slave.

I was raised with the help of yayas from the moment I was born, up until I left for college. When I go back home, they are still there waiting for me. I’ve had a number of yayas over the years, all of whom I have loved for the care they gave me, and not once has it crossed my mind to ask myself if my family treated them right until this article.

I know for a fact that my family has always paid them enough, gave them their own private room, did not deprive them of food or leisure, and covered their medical needs when needed. Yet that still does not erase the fact that there is something inherently problematic with this kasambahay culture that is laden with social inequality.

Another Filipina reader says the article “opened up conversations”:

I was so moved by the essay, but a bit put out by the instant condemnation it has gathered, especially by Western readers. While the abuse (and the Tizon family’s seems to be an extreme case) can in no way be forgiven or tolerated, taking in helpers is a deeply rooted practice in Philippine society. Poverty is rampant; it’s what leads Lola and countless others to submit themselves to serving richer people who live in the cities. Each relationship is different, with some looking like Lola’s and the Tizons’ and others a proper employer-employee relationship with employee benefits. I wouldn’t be as quick to call the modern-day helpers “slaves,” but it is definitely dehumanizing, even in the best relationships.

A lot of the culture comes into play. For example, there’s the concept of utang na loob, this sense of gratitude people expect their helpers to have, for even taking them in and giving them a job when so many others don’t have that. Our kasambahays raised us, but we’re always taught that we’re above them and that we will achieve better things than them. It’s drilled into our heads and something that even our kasambahays subscribe to. In Alex Tizon’s home, I bet it was difficult for Lola to even sit on that couch. She had been conditioned to think that it was simply not her place.

Poverty does this to people. And it’s common. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s accepted.

It is so easy to call “My Family’s Slave” a simple slaveowners’ story. But these characters, told from Mr. Tizon’s POV only, are definitely multidimensional. A lot of people have made bad moral decisions throughout their lifetime, and while I’m definitely not excusing Mr. Tizon’s, I read the regret into it. The conversations he has opened are his legacy, and I’m thankful and hopeful. I hope our kasambahay laws will be improved and that we create a friendlier, more humanizing environment for the people who raised us and continue to raise our families.

And Edgie writes:

I think that the responses to this essay give credence to the author’s ability to tell a story, and it was a lovely (almost poetic) ending [to his life] to publish this essay. All the hate, awe, and marvel at his account of Lola is a testament to just how many have been touched by his piece.

With sadness, I know that the noise for eradicating modern slavery will die down, and people will forget as they always do. At best, I hope that there will be some progress for this cause.

But I believe that the real power of this story is giving a face and name to humanity’s propensity for sacrifice, forgiveness, and love despite deplorable conditions. The tragedy of people like Lola—whom people pity and admire at the same time—or any other great human being without a voice is that their stories are never known. For me, this was Tizon’s gift and redemption.

This week, we published Alex Tizon’s essay “My Family’s Slave,” about the woman he knew as Lola: Eudocia Tomas Pulido, who was enslaved and treated cruelly by his family, and who raised him and whom he loved.

It’s a deeply complicated personal narrative, and the response from readers has been overwhelming. Scores of your emails and comments have expressed being deeply moved by the piece—“feeling sadness, anger, frustration, hope, and relief,” as one reader, Naziat Adnan, put it. At the same time, manyothers have criticized Alex, who died in March, and The Atlantic’s treatment of the story as an excuse for slaveowners. One reader wrote: “The author aided and abetted in slavery. His pathetic efforts to ease her situation in the last few years of her life were not enough.”

The Filipino magazine Scout published a response to the backlash, noting that “a lot of the international outrage is coming from a place where they don’t fully understand the culture the story is set in. ” (The article was soon revised “to reinforce the fact that the author and Scout don’t condone the Filipino culture of indentured/forced servitude in any way.”)

For my part, I found the story haunting, both for its painful subject matter and by coincidence: I’m half-Filipina, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest where Alex did, so that I could picture the places and landscapes he mentions in the background of Lola’s story. Though he doesn’t explain it in the article, Lola is the Tagalog honorific for “grandmother.” As a child, I didn’t realize this; I thought Lola was simply my grandmother’s name.

We’ll be publishing a number of responses to “My Family’s Slave” in the next few weeks, outlining the economic, cultural, and historical context for Alex and Lola’s personal story. We’ll also be publishing your own personal stories in Notes. From Claudia:

I wept so much while reading Lola’s story because in a way it reminds me of my life. I was also brought to this country when I was a child, lived with my uncle and aunt, and was responsible for taking care of their three kids, cleaning, cooking, and working in their stores (laundromat/salon/pharmacy) for free. This went on for years, except I was lucky enough to go to school.

I was not allowed to discuss the goings-on at the house with anyone. Once, I made the mistake of sharing what was going on at home to my school counselor. The counselor called my uncle to try to setup a time to discuss with them what I told them. When I got home, I got a beating that I never dared to mention it to anyone.

I was luckier than Lola because I was able to leave while in my 20s. I am so sad that Lola never got to live her life, get married or have kids. Thank you for taking care of her and making sure that her last few years, she was free. May her soul rest in peace.

If Lola’s situation resonates with you, or if you have another response to the article to share, please tell us your story: hello@theatlantic.com.

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”